How the New York Times Gets it Wrong on Latin America
How the New York Times Gets it Wrong on Latin America
By: Joe Emersberger
Published 27 March 2016
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In a New York Times op-ed, Jorge Castañeda, Mexico’s foreign minister from 2000 to 2003, offered a few broad “lessons” to Latin America’s left governments. He accused them of not saving enough during good times and of failing to address corruption. Implicitly, he accused Ecuador and of course Venezuela, one of the international media’s favourite targets for vilification, of succumbing to “authoritarian temptations.” He says they “muzzled the press, stacked the judiciary, harassed opposition leaders and tampered with electoral systems.”
He says nothing about several violent coup attempts against left governments over the past fifteen years in Venezuela (2002), Haiti (2004), Bolivia (2008), Honduras (2009), and Ecuador (2010). The coups in Honduras and Haiti were successful and the consequences continue to plague those countries. Haiti’s coup was actually perpetrated by U.S. troops who kidnapped President Jean Bertrand Aristide. The coup in Honduras succeeded in no small part due the perfidy of Hillary Clinton. A right-wing “parliamentary coup” that ousted President Fernando Lugo in Paraguay in 2012 was also successful. The coup in Venezuela succeeded for two days before it was defeated. The coup attempt in Ecuador nearly took the life of President Rafael Correa.
The “authoritarian abuses“ denounced in newspapers like the New York Times were, in reality, mostly justifiable measures taken to prevent coups and protect democracy. For example, a powerful weapon in the hands of right-wing putschists in Latin America has always been the private media. That is being dramatically illustrated in Brazil at the moment. Blunting that weapon by expanding state media and using regulatory measures (which all governments have) is decried as “muzzling the press”. The allegation will seem valid if you accept the right of unelected billionaires to dominate public debate and incite coups against elected governments. Even if you don’t accept such a vile premise, you might still believe the allegation if you “inform” yourself about Latin America by casually reading the corporate press at any end of the political spectrum.
It is always worth recalling that the liberal New York Times editors cheered the 2002 coup in Venezuela with even more enthusiasm than the Bush administration (which was also openly pleased and had funded many of the perpetrators). Very recently, in a widely circulated interview with Obama in the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg casually referred to Hugo Chavez as “the late anti-American Venezuelan dictator.”
More:
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/How-the-New-York-Times-Gets-it-Wrong-on-Latin-America-20160327-0029.html